"Really. I would never try to steal him from you. I know the one he truly loves is you."
The hickeys on her neck and chest burned into my vision like needles, the pain driving straight from my eyes down into the pit of my stomach. Bite marks. Not just hickeys. He had bitten her. Not deep enough to bond, but deep enough to claim. Deep enough that every wolf who saw her would smell him on her for days.
I looked at the two of them standing there, and I couldn't form a single word.
My throat had closed over. My hands hung at my sides, and I realized distantly that they were trembling, a fine vibration that started in my fingers and traveled up through my wrists, my forearms, settling somewhere in the hollow of my chest where the mating bond pulsed its sick, infected warmth. I didn't know people like this existed. People whose sense of right and wrong was so thoroughly, spectacularly shattered.
And somehow, they were the ones I'd ended up with.
In that moment, the thought of severing the bond erupted in my mind like a flare.